Nxter News – September 2018 (II): There Is Nothing So Stable As Change

September (II)

Welcome, dear Nxters and other followers!

An unanswered question in physics is “do the fundamental constants of the universe change?” Our universe has many such fundamental constants, some more applicable to daily life than others – anyone reading this can appreciate the constant (c) used for the speed of light. Yet there is evidence that one, the “Fine Structure constant (α),” might have evolved over cosmic time. If one of the unchanging constants of the universe, one that essentially governs chemistry, has changed – might all fundamental constants change? This is not sophistry, as it indicates that one of the few actual constants of the universe is…change – suggesting that (maybe) the laws of the physical universe evolve.

Much like how the universe was different long ago, you and I are different than we were a year ago – we are all one year wiser and one year closer to death. Technology has changed and demonstrably made our lives better. Would anyone reading this honestly prefer to go back to a time when most of humanity’s combined knowledge was not easily accessible from a computer, let alone our phones? Like the internet and the PC before it, and TV before it, and sliced bread before it – the blockchain has the potential to be a transformative technology that just simply makes everyone’s lives better once we begin to properly use it. So do not be afraid of change, it is inevitable and should be embraced rather than combatted – we need to meet the challenges of the future, and using blockchain is a great first step – now more than ever, as it’s about to be changed forever by the simplicity provided by Lightweight Contracts on the pioneering scalable Ardor PoS platform.

Last week we learned how Moldova might change their wine tourism industry by incorporating the blockchain, we learned more about the most recent upgrades in Lightweight Contracts from Lior, there is a new Nxter Puzzle: in space, updates across the many businesses on Ardor, many of which have incipient or in-progress ICO’s, the TOKOK exchange listed IGNIS, and much more.

We now offer the data privacy protections offered by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law to ALL of our readers. As a consequence, we need to ask you to opt-in, if you subscribed before 28.08.2018. It is the same as it was before, short-form curated highlights from Nxter.org served directly to your inbox, once a week! By opting in you will be supporting independent journalism and help grow this newsletter and Nxter into something even bigger and better! Please join us HERE

Jelurida – Updates

Good progress on all fronts this week, working on "Contract Manager Plugin", "Contract Verification", "API Callers" all should be available in the next #Ardor release later in September. More details next week. pic.twitter.com/qtUM4RKC37

Lightweight Contract testing and development is ongoing and progressing fast. The next version will be released on the Ardor testnet this September and will include the Contract Runner add-on, Contract Manager utility, and API callers.

Below there is a tutorial/seminar just released on Jelurida’s Ardor YouTube channel. In it Lior elaborates on the theme of “simplicity” regarding all they have done to launch this unique Contracts framework.

Watch it below (turning on subtitles/close-captioning is recommended due to poor audio quality).

Lightweight Contracts Seminar

TL;DW: Simplicity.

Lior Yaffe and Jelurida have worked for many months to make developing on the Ardor blockchain platform as easy as possible. With the latest version of the Ardor testnet and the IntelliJ Java IDE installed, open the project folder included in IntelliJ and begin parsing and analyzing the 10 provided sample contracts. Once you have your own contract written, push it to the blockchain using the Contract Manager utility and then trigger it with the Contract Runner add-on: the Contract Runner is an automation layer that sits on top of the Ardor API.

Lightweight Contracts are created to be backward compatible and have been designed to be stateless. Simply put, this means the contracts are easier to edit and use because things like the balance of an account do not need to be migrated from version to version if you need to make changes. There is also no risk of locking yourself out of your tokens because the worst thing that can happen if say your contract has an infinite loop in it is that you will need to restart your node. Once that is done, fix the error in your contract code and that is the end of that.

These contracts are not part of the blockchain consensus so you can link any Java library jar to the classpath of the node runner. This also means that Lightweight Contracts can act as Oracles – interacting with software/data off the blockchain. For security, there is only a single node for executing these contracts. Trigger transactions are used as reference transactions to ensure that the trigger or the transaction do not expire and an Ardor feature called Economic Clustering (EC) Block is used to ensure that the contract is always deployed on the consensus fork and not left to rot on a fork that goes nowhere. A tradeoff on security is that only one node is executing the Contract Runner, so yes some level of trust is involved in the Contract Runner not “cheating” but there are issues to mitigate this, most notably the well-known Account Control property whereby a transaction can be posted to the blockchain but cannot be executed unless approved by previously defined second parties. The design of the contracts allows for contract parallelization.

Right now YOU can be learning these cool things by downloading the latest version of the Ardor testnet and following a simple tutorial!

Website Redesign

An issue that bothers some in the community is why does the Jelurida website still look like something from the 90’s? As this is a returning (and often heated) discussion among Nxters, we decided to share some insight here. Lior joined a conversation on Slack about Jelurida’s website redesign and some other concerns shared by the community and wrote:

The reason the Jelurida web site wasn’t updated so far is not because we do not consider it important, it’s because we see it as very important and sensitive and we don’t want to make any mistake in the process.
I’ll explain.

First and foremost we view jelurida.com as a single source of reliable information for anything related to the development of the blockchain. If you need the latest release, testnet access, blockchain copy, you should get it from there without worrying about hacking, phishing and the like. And for this purpose the current web site is doing its job.

As a selling tool and the front page of the company it really needs to improve, we all agree about this one. But in order to improve it, Jelurida needs to decide about the key messages first, who is our target audience, the crypto enthusiasts or the corporate customers? What product do we focus on Nxt? Ardor? Ignis? child chains, private chains etc. How can we present all our brands without causing confusion. What is the key message for each brand? These are difficult questions which we need to answer first and everything else needs to be derived from them.

Then there’s the issue of the very nice community web sites, should we merge them into Jelurida.com? Should we sponsor them as standalone web sites? How can we make sure the information and brand in one web site do not contradict with info in another site.

Then branding is also difficult, for example NXT has a strong brand and familiar logo, so does Ardor, the Jelurida and Ignis logos are less famous. Should we try to merge all of them into a single standard and lose some of the recognition? Should we leave them as is? How does this impact our message? Are we a young and cool startup? Are we a development shop with years of experience? All these things has to be debated and agreed by a remote team of marketing experts and engineers each one with its own strong opinions about the subject.

Then for producing more content, we need someone with a non-existent skill of both high quality content production skills and excellent knowledge of our products and our history. Due to the magnitude of this task it keeps being delayed. I agree it is our fault collectively as Jelurida (surely you shouldn’t blame Veronica for this or anyone specific). For me as an engineer it is always simpler to focus on coding and features and not on branding and messages but I’m fully aware that this has to be done and it will be done.

Ardor Bootcamp and the ANG – Raspberry Pi Giveaway!

A couple of weeks ago we let you know about the ANG sponsored Ardor Bootcamp contest on Udemy, created by efunkem, so that all students that completed his course and followed the instructions would participate in a draw for a Raspberry Pi 3, with Ardor installed in it.

This week the winner was announced by Elizabeth (ANG):

Congratulations! Kseniya Zhytomirsky has completed the Ardor Bootcamp course on Udemy.com and won the drawing for a RaspberryPI with Ardor installed.

Kseniya has been a blockchain developer for several years and has a team of about fourteen working in Ukraine. She discovered Ardor when she was looking for alternative solutions to blockchain payments systems and took the course to learn more.

She learned the basics in the Ardor Bootcamp and has been exploring the APIs for project development and integration for her clients.
Congratulations, Kseniya and welcome to our community!

Nxter Puzzle: In Space

So, this week we are zooming in on cities… Find the city names, write them down in lowercase divided by a single space – and wait for the 11th and 12th city to be announced. These 12 city names will together form a passphrase, and the account this passphrase opens holds 500 IGNIS.

Where the 11th and 12th city will be announced is in the deep unknown. It might be a good idea to keep an eye on the usual community hangouts, and of course, it never hurts to follow Nxter, @madfox1234 and @TheCryptoWoman.

ArdorForum is Live

On September 4th the ArdorForum went live, and nxtforum was stylized to make it look a bit more modern. Both share the same database so an account on Nxtforum before the 4th means you have an ArdorForum account with the same credentials.

VanBreuk:

Hello all,
as scheduled, https://nxtforum.org is back online – along with the new https://ardorforum.org

This new forum has its origin and spirit in the Nxt Forum, the official forum community for the Nxt blockchain technology since 2014. In order to preserve for new community members the enormous amount of historical information shared over the years in the Nxt Forum, while providing a fresh new environment for the new Ardor platform, both forums share resources including the user database.

Registering a new user in either forum will give access to both with the same credentials. During the first days, and while we strengthen anti-spam measures, new forum accounts will require staff approval, so please be patient if you register a new forum account. I’ll go through the requests as soon as possible.

Finnovista Pitch Day Madrid, September 18th

BlockchainFest’18, in Istanbul, September 18-19th

Francisco Sarrias and Veronica are going to participate in BlockchainFest’18. Jelurida will have a stand during the two-day conference, will participate in a discussion about creating a blockchain from scratch, and will lead the conversation of Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) in a talk the second day.

BUSINESSES ON NXT/ARDOR

C2C – Update

As you probably know if you’ve been following our newsletters, C2C is a company that aims to develop innovative devices to easily convert your coins and cash to cryptocurrencies. Currently, it is an Ardor based token (Asset ID: 10904853980055209979)

C2C circulating supply has been finally been set to 299,969,680. At the moment of this writing, it can be traded at the third party exchanges IDAX and Stocks.Exchange.

Dominium ITO Update

Last week the Dominium Initial Token Offering (ITO) began. The ITO lasts until the end of the year (December 31st.) 500M tokens are available for purchase. The price of the DOM tokens increases every 125M tokens sold. Because Dominium is a going to be a child chain on Ardor you can purchase DOM utility tokens with ARDR / NXT / and IGNIS as well as EUR, BTC, ETH, BCH, LTC, BNB.

Most of the money raised by Dominium will go towards purchasing property for their property management portfolios. Concurrently, there is also a DOM Airdrop going on.

Triffic ICO Update

While waiting for the Triffic ICO to come (December the 3rd, 2018) they have updated their whitepaper and website, and now both much more informative than the previous ones. Take a look!

Alongside the new website going online, they launched a tester bounty program for their apps. The blurb below does a good job of explaining why Triffic chose the Ardor ecosystem over Ethereum.

GPS Tokens are what makes the Triffic ecosystem tick. We chose the Ardor blockchain as its parent/child chain structure is less likely to lead to blockchain bloat than Ethereum alternatives. In fact, Ethereum will be copying Ardor’s parent/child chain fundamentals in its forthcoming ‘Plasma’ update – which currently has no scheduled launch date.

Because GPS Tokens use the Ardor ecosystem, we are offering significant bonuses to people who purchase GPS Tokens with Ardor. This is to encourage people to install the Ardor software and start to understand the sheer power and versatility of Ardor. Our token whitelisting process makes it easy to generate an Ardor wallet with a single click and Ardor can easily be purchased by clicking below.

CiviliXation Digital COOP

In last week’s Nxter Newsly, we found Elizabeth (ANG) in Moldovia, attending a Nxt meetup, talking to government officials about blockchain usage and also interviewing Lee Gibson Grant about his Moldovian initiative, the Distributed Technology Moldova Association (DTMA).

After the deadline, Lee presented on stage at the third UNWTO (UN World Tourism Organization) Global Conference on Wine Tourism, organized in partnership with the Government of the Republic of Moldova, and talked about his use of Nxt in Greece and how it could be used to revolutionize wine tourism in rural areas.

…
It’s coop shares
So there is a legal structure by government law.
…
www.drachmae.money
you can now purchase DTG for E-gagauzia project in over 15 different currencies.
…
At the moment DTG is a token created on BigchainDB
but will move to NXT once fundraising is finished

Tarasca DAO – Update

Tarasca DAO is Decentralized Autonomous Organization for the creation of games and art services on blockchain that will be built on IGNIS that we already mentioned in some previous newsletters.

This week they published a new article on Steemit and have given us some more details about the project:

We would like to underline: the cards created by Tarasca will not be under our control (…). Once created, any developer or even any eSports company can create games in which the cards participate, without needing to ask for permission from Tarasca or pay us a fee.

We can imagine entrepreneurs using our cards for various games, from simple random duels to the most sophisticated graphic apps. And we will rejoice in the life that they will give to our creatures!

In short, Tarasca DAO is building a small infrastructure for public use and free for games in Ardor. We hope it wil be used and grows.

EZYcount – Private Token Sale

The second round of the EZYcount token sale is ongoing, ending this week – September 14th.

Registered participants can turn 1 Swiss franc (CHF) into 11 EZY tokens. Next week, after the 14th, it will be 10 EZY tokens per CHF in the second round, which lasts till October 15th, 2018. Vivian, the CEO of EZYcount, published a 90-second explainer about the token sale below.

EZYcount is an online accounting software developed in Switzerland for self-employed and SMB’s. The goal of the token sale is to raise funds for AI integration into the EZYcount accounting and invoicing software. EZYcount will be using a new software licensing model called Token as a License (Taal). This token will represent a lifelong and tradeable software license for EZYcount solutions.

You can purchase EZY TaaL tokens with USD, CHF, EUR, BTC, ETH, LTC, ARDR, and all Ardor child chain tokens. If EZYcount does not reach their minimum target of CHF 1 million, they will refund all amounts invested.

The unique design of Ardor allows the simultaneous existence of multiple blockchains, known as child chains, with many features and with their security guaranteed on a global level by the parent Ardor chain. The first child chain of Ardor is the Ignis child chain which uses IGNIS tokens for its operation. All existing and well tested Nxt blockchain features are available on the Ignis child chain, with multiple Ardor platform specific enhancements being added.

NXT Added to Changehero.io

Support your Tokens

As always, there are opportunities for community voting to help list Ardor / Nxt / Ignis on new crypto exchanges and even some old ones. As long as the listings are still up, there are still opportunities for you to help the community by casting your vote.

Blockchain Will Save Your Business, This is not a Drill!

This is a great series of articles written by Adedayo Adebajo, Lead Support Specialist at Jelurida, that explains many advantages that the blockchain technology can bring to different areas of business and life out there. Very personal, passionate and enjoyable. The gist is that blockchain is great while not for everything – be smart and see if your business (or country!) can smartly use a blockchain.

He wrote:

Businesses are now striving to be faster in delivery, more accountable, more customer-centric and profitable. This unfortunately we all know cannot be achieved using the old methods of running a business
…
Blockchain is meant for everyone but not every aspect of your business can work with the Blockchain
…
on Ardor, you aren’t required to learn any alien language before you can deploy a contract…Oracles provide a bridge between the Blockchain and external resources. The ability to develop and deploy them quickly and efficiently is essential for any smart contracts ecosystem. Ardor lightweight contracts provide a flexible and straightforward mechanism to develop Oracles which can interface with any external resource.

I am an African (…) Blockchain may not be the savior or the hero of other continents, but deserving or not, it is the redeemer Africa needs to get back on her feet.
…
The goal of the financial institution that grants loans is to regain the loaned amount with interest; the goal of the one who loans is to make more profit, return the loan and to be financially stable. But the goal which wasn’t always there is the goal of the middleman that hands over the money. His is a selfish goal before releasing the funds. The goal of getting rewarded or bribed from where he’s made no effort. That’s the power granted to him by the centralized nature of the system we practice.

And that is the news of last week! Everyone and everything may change, but a constant is our need to provide excellent news, which requires a lot of time and money. Please support us by subscribing to our email list as we aim to be here for many years to come serving you the best and most relevant news. We hope to find you here again next week!

Help us grow by rewarding us for our efforts:
NXT-TK9J-MEKH-MUP9-HFCH2 / ARDOR-TK9J-MEKH-MUP9-HFCH2. Thanks.

Want to follow us on Twitter or Telegram for important breaking updates during the week as they happen – please do!